Sales update
In addition to a later-than-expected change in US demand for our crop 2025 Galaxy hops, new sales have also been slow in the domestic markets. Industry media remains fairly negative, with further brewery closures, sales or mergers featuring heavily. While consumer sentiment is low and household incomes remain under pressure from increased cost of living pressure, it is expected that total beer volumes in Australia will continue to decline. Unfortunately, we don’t expect to see a recovery of the premium beer categories we predominantly sell into in the immediate future. Despite the flat market conditions, we are well positioned with low inventory levels on hand from crop 2024. Major varieties such as Galaxy, Vic Secret, Eclipse and Ella are all above 98% contracted.
A detailed marketing strategy and tactical sales plan has been presented to Haas to aid in the recovery of Aussie hop sales in the US. The US market is in a similar condition to the Australian market, but perhaps 6-12 months ahead and just starting to rebound from the bottom of the market. Just like HPA, hop growers in the US have taken the appropriate steps to reduce supply in response to the market conditions. US brewers remain the biggest flavour-orientated hop buyers in the world and our efforts are focused on success in this market.
Supporting our sales and marketing endeavours is the positive impact of crop 2023 and crop 2024 in beer. Both local and international brewing customers are very happy with the way our Aussie hops are currently performing, sharing statements like “that [crop 2024] Galaxy was some of the very best I have ever worked with, even going back to 2016.” (Steve Luke, Cloudburst Brewing). This is some of the most powerful marketing we can do – by growing a great crop and producing high-quality pellets that brewers love to use in their beers. Quality counts!
US Hop Selections
HPA recognise the important role that hop selections play in the beer industry. Flavour profile can differ from season-to-season and lot-by-lot. For this reason, brewers who visit US hop farms are often invited to select the specific bale lots they want to purchase and ultimately use in the brewery. Their decision to offer selections is largely driven by variable quality outcomes due to a large number of independent growers who are spread across diverse geography all contributing to the yield of a single hop variety.
As regional representatives of the global BarthHaas group, HPA is responsible for selecting consistently high-quality US hops on behalf of our Aussie brewing customers. In September, Owen Johnston, Chris Swersey and Katie Crane visited our friends at HAAS to select Amarillo®, Cascade, Centennial, Citra® and Mosaic®. Each year, we bring a select group of valued customers along to help them understand this process and have input into the selected batches. This year we were joined by representatives from Tribe and Young Henrys who were also invited to attend a full day Hops Academy, tour the HBC breeding garden and HAAS hop farms, as well as their hop products plant, full-scale CO2 extractors, pellet plant, packing line, and Innovations Brewery where they had the opportunities to taste new hop varieties and hop products.
Our involvement in US hop selections may seem contradictory to our decision not to offer Aussie hop selections. On the contrary, we are in a unique situation compared to the US growing regions that are experiencing increasing diversity. HPA are a relatively small, independent, vertically integrated business that has sole custody of our proprietary hops across all stages of the hop production process, from cultivation and growing all the way through to packaging and sales. This doesn’t mean we don’t experience some variability in quality outcomes, but we can minimise these variabilities by being in full control of the whole crop from the very beginning to the very end. As a result, instead of offering selections we have made it our mission to deliver the highest possible quality outcomes with the lowest possible flavour variability through blending. This means we distribute equitable hops to all of our brewing customers.
Hops Academy
Our entire industry, from growers to suppliers and brewers, is enduring growing pressure due to at-risk supply chains, labour shortages, high energy costs, and increasingly complicated bureaucracy. This means it’s more important than ever to create opportunities to really connect with our brewing customers and support a sustainable future of quality beer.
Following the cancellation of BrewCon24, HPA decided to bring hop education to our brewing customers by hosting a series of BarthHaas Hops Academy’s in Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland in August. In the free 1-day workshops Michael Capaldo and Mark Zunkel, Technical Sales Manager at BarthHaas, taught attendees how to identify and describe hop aromas, design beers based on desired flavour outcomes, improve process efficiencies, reduce waste, and even inform how their marketing and front of house teams talk about hops and beer.
As you can see in this video, we thoroughly enjoyed sharing our technical expertise with hundreds of brewers hungry to learn about the evolution of hop flavour. So much so that we’re backing it up with a series of BarthHaas Liquid Hops sessions in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Wellington and Auckland in October. In these free 3-hour workshops our Sale Reps and Kevin McGarry, from the BarthHaas Global Innovation Support Team, will teach attendees to push the limits of what Flex®, Incognito®, Spectrum, HopAid® and HopHaze® can do, how they can help to reduce risk, and stand out from the crowd using real world case studies and technical advice from Bridge Road Brewers and Panhead Custom Ales.
Customer Testimonials
Research shows that positive customer reviews and testimonials make people trust a business more. During harvest 2024 we asked 4 Pines, Buttons Brewing, Communion Brewing Co, Du Cane Brewing, Little Rivers Brewing and Shambles Brewery the hard-hitting questions about hops and brewing, turning them into video testimonials that we started sharing on our Instagram feed in September. We’ll drop a new video testimonial every Tuesday over the coming months, from creating a new hop flavour and the best part about hop harvest tours to brewing tips for using Aussie hops and the benefits of liquid hops. Stay tuned!
Harvest Tours
Bushy Park Estates recently featured on an episode of A Little Bit Agricultural, a YouTube series telling the stories of Aussie farmers and the industries they work in. You can watch The Secret To A Good Beer episode here, which must have gone viral because it’s already shaping up to be a busy hop harvest of farms tours in 2025. Hobart is hosting the 38th Asia Pacific IBD Convention from 3-7 March, with multiple farm tours planned pre and post-event, and BarthHaas and Haas have confirmed they will be bringing a group of US, European and Asian Aussie hop customers to visit again after a short hiatus.
